DVD retail pricing has turned out to be quite beneficial to many rentailers, and rental spending is showing signs of resurrection after flat-lining the past couple of years, with revs up a bit so far this year.

PPV (now VOD) has become less of a concern as DVD has sparked a shorter shelf life for movies that do most of their business prior to reaching PPV, which was never much of a threat anyway.

And now direct-response marketing prior to or simultaneous with retail release is considered a good thing.

Who would have guessed that a company based in a former dairy building in a once-seedy area of Portland with a name that sounded more like an entity specializing in merchandise related to a Star Wars robot would become a friend of retailers and a welcome member of the video industry?

R2 Entertainment has spent the past four years selling more than $40 million worth of DVDs through infomercials and its Web site, which boasts about R2's "innovative direct-to-consumer campaigns that cut out the middlemen."

The company's DVDs have generated significant attention, particularly its Johnny Carson collections, which sold 400,000 units on DVD by the end of last year and has shipped another 200,000 since Carson's death in January, as well as sets featuring stars such as Bob Hope, Sonny & Cher and others.

R2 still resides in the same old dairy building, but the area has been transformed into the newly hip and trendy Pearl District, featuring numerous art galleries from which eclectic paintings and sculptures selected by R2 founder and CEO Tim O'Leary now decorate the company's ever more crowded headquarters.

Mirroring that evolution in workplace environment, R2 has come to recognize the value of retail sales and is now actively courting that constituency. There will be just a six-week window for its direct-marketing campaign of next month's This Is Your Life collection before it is made available to retailers in June, which will serve as what retailers have come to perceive as a pre-release marketing campaign.

R2 is also reuniting Tony Orlando and Dawn for a live performance at the opening night party of the VSDA convention in Las Vegas in late July, just ahead of the early August release of a DVD of the music group's '70s TV series.

Under VP Brant Berry, R2 is not just digging up and licensing classic TV shows for re-release; it's using that as a hook to create new programming such as new Christmas CDs later this year from Tony Orlando and Dawn and The Captain and Tenille. The latter will have a holiday CD with two original songs following a DVD of their '70s TV series in October.

Berry, a fanatic for TV and music entertainment of the '70s, has also set up R2 as a provider of DVD production services, having recently completed work on bonus features for Sony's May 10 DVD release of The Partridge Family.

Now that dealers have accepted direct-response marketing, what's next?

PJ thanks for posting the article on Brant/R2. Congratulations Brant on your hard work! I will look forward to the features your company produced on the PF DVD and will look forward to the Tony Orlando & Dawn varitey show DVD! Any word on the reunion being more than a one time thing? I'd love to see them do a tour, perhaps the casino circuit?